Bill Nye documentary trailer targets climate change, 'selfie fatigue'

Bill Nye got a generation of kids hooked on science, but now he’s moving on to “something bigger.” In the first trailer for Bill Nye: Science Guy, a new documentary coming to theaters from PBS Distribution, “Bill Nye the Science Guy” becomes Bill Nye “the Science Statesman” as he tackles climate change, climate change deniers, and “selfie fatigue.”

The new footage reveals glimpses of Nye studying at Cornell and later becoming the guy who made “young people feel excited about science again” with his show in the 1990s, Bill Nye the Science Guy. “The Science Guy show contained the science that excited Bill, and you, the viewer, can’t help but be just as excited as the instructor,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the doc’s subjects, says.

Today, Nye has a new mission. “Nowadays, I’m talking to adults and I’m not mincing words,” he says. “Climate is changing, it’s our fault, we gotta get to work on this.”

The documentary follows Nye’s journey as he launches a solar-propelled spacecraft with his Planetary Society organization, bears witness to what he’s told is “raising sea levels” and “drowning Miami eventually,” and confronts deniers of climate change, evolution, and — more generally — a science-based worldview.

“I don’t have a PhD. I talk to the experts and hold the evidence in my hands,” Nye says in the trailer. “These people who are denying science then, especially, denying climate change, we can’t have this. … If we raise a generation of kids that can’t think critically, we are headed for trouble.”